What Developers Want to Know About Job Opportunities in 2018

If you’ve ever written a technical job listing or a recruitment email, you’ve probably wondered if you’ll capture the attention of your ideal candidates. How can you be sure that your job opportunity highlights the things that matter to developers? More importantly, what matters most to the developers that you want to hire?

Over the last few years, developers’ most important job evaluation criteria have essentially remained unchanged. For any company looking to hire software developers, it’s still crucial to pay developers fairly, offer opportunities for professional development, and foster healthy work environments. But in the 2018 Developer Hiring Landscape, some of these criteria leapfrogged in importance over others, especially compared to what we found last year.

So, what do developers want to know about job opportunities in 2018? To help you stand out and hire developers, let’s compare this year’s findings to what we’ve seen in the past.

How Developers Assess Potential Jobs

Compensation and benefits have always been important to developers. This year, it was their top job evaluation criteria. In fact, over 18% of developers said that it was one of the most important things they consider about any job opportunity.

The rest of the top five criteria might look familiar from previous years, as well. Not far behind salary were the languages and technologies that they’d be working with (17.3%), opportunities for professional development (16%), the office environment or culture (13.6%), and work from home options (10.3%).

At first glance, this might not look like brand new information. But in 2017, the list was very different. In fact, on a scale of 1-4 last year, developers said that opportunities for professional development were their top priority. Sure, compensation and benefits weren’t far behind, but languages and technologies jumped from their 4th most important job evaluation criteria in 2017 to their second most important factor this year.

How Their Job Evaluation Criteria Helps You Hire Developers

When you know what developers look for in new jobs, that list becomes your checklist for all of your recruitment materials, right? In many ways, yes. But it’s important not to overwhelm passive tech candidates by promoting all of the things that make your opportunity unique.

Let’s say that you’re a candidate who has just received recruitment email. Even if it was personalized, would you read the entire message if it were 300 words long? Probably not. Instead, pick no more than two things from the list we discussed earlier to highlight in emails to developers. If you send personalized messages to programmers, you’ll have many more chances to tell them everything they want to know about your job opportunity.

What about your technical job listings? Start by writing it without developers’ job evaluation criteria as a guide. Write them as you normally would, in the tone that makes your company unique. Once you’ve finished your first draft, refer back to their job evaluation criteria to double check your work. Not only will this help you ensure that you’re highlighting the right things, but it will make it much easier to write naturally—without worrying about checking off all the boxes on developers’ list of criteria.

Rich is a Content Marketing Writer at Stack Overflow, where he covers the latest in tech recruiting and developer engagement. When he's not writing, Rich can be found hanging with his wife, watching his favorite college football team with his dad, or running around Manhattan in preparation for his next marathon.